exxos blog - random goings on

[exxos]

This week keyboard errors. How is this even possible?!





Also another weird thing is my NAS drive is not accessible outside of my network (IE over the net) unless I open all the ports above 50,000. It does not even use any ports anywhere near that range. It is not consistent either. I thought I narrowed it down to a range of about 3,000 ports, so I kept halving and doubling continuously until I got it down to a single address. But nope it could not be that simple. As then later I opened up the range and it started working again where as before it would not. I narrowed it down 3 or 4 times on the range of ports and what number failed at one point then worked later.

I'm not leaving thousands of ports open. So the NAS will just have to remain "broken" as I really cannot be bothered with all the stupid faults any more.

Also Dawn's washing machine has a draining problem again. I had it in bits a few weeks back because it seemed like something was blocking the pump. there was a tiny bit of fluff in it well basically nothing. But this washing machine has been a issue for a long time now. I can fill the drum up with water and it will empty very quickly. So I cannot see how it has a emptying problem.

Anyway,Samsung can come out and screw around with it because there are simply not enough hours in the day to deal with all this BS all the time.

I am starting to really despise everything computer or electronic related these days. Absolutely nothing works properly any more. All my time just goes into screwing around with things that I should simply not be screwing around with, or have to screw around with in the first place!!

[exxos]

Finally spent a bit of time on catching up with store stock a bit! Also been a little busy on and off tidying the garage to generate some more storage space. My workshop is just totally full of crap and I cannot find anything at all. A lot of things like motherboards, power supplies and keyboards etc which are just taking up space. So they will be reallocated to the garage in the very near future. I'm really getting too old to be sat on the floor trying to do soldering all the time! So need my workbench back!

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Also my second (used) MSI X570 PRO Arrived along with the new power supply. I only went with a cheap one which looked like it would do the job as I didn't want to spend a lot because it was only for really testing the motherboard out anyway. But always useful to have a spare.

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The motherboard came off my "favourite" auction site. As with most things one tends to buy off there, never work properly!

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First off was to install my "old" Ryzen 5 5500 and my "old" RAM into it.

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As my humongous cooler in my main PC seems to be a total overkill, and again I did not want to spend money on another cooler, I just used the stock AMD cooler which came in the CPU box.

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There is a lot of conflicting information about these power supplies and what connectors it had. So it was actually a 4 pin CPU power connector short I was not sure if it actually needed that connector or not. So I continuity checked them and they was all connected together anyway.

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So my "jank" setup.

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And then let all the usual problems commence Long story short it would not boot up, it would not even get to the BIOS / POST screen. It just lite the CPU RED LED which means CPU error

Another long story short: The motherboard was allegedly only used for 10 months. it looked in good condition as well which is why I purchased it. However turns out the BIOS was totally bricked! So no way this board was working at the point of sale. I left the guy neutral feedback for that lot with a mini rant on it didn't work.

Thankfully these boards have a BIOS recovery mode which is a new feature to me. Where you can plug in a USB stick with the BIOS ROM (as a file) on it and even without the CPU and RAM plugged into the motherboard, you can press a button and it will flash a LED on the back to indicate that is then successfully flashing the BIOS.

<Linus> yayyyyy </Linus>

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[exxos]

After testing the pico drive and ultrasatan on my STE I always seem to end up with this problem.

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I can copy files about on a 200 megabyte partition without problems. The problems only seem to appear after deleting a couple thousand of files.

Interestingly it more often than not crashes on the QQ folder. The folder is empty and there are also empty folders numbered 1-10 for example but only ever crashes on the QQ ones.

Even more odd is while it has bombed, the keyboard light is still flashing like it is still polling the floppy drive. So while it has crashed the interrupts or seemingly still firing fine.

My current STE is one of the more later boards with a "good DMA" and external blitter. The only thing I can really do is replace the DMA with the original -38 and see if anything changes.

[stephen_usher]

Sounds like an edge case corruption bug to me.

[exxos]

Sounds like an edge case corruption bug to me.

Maybe. But why.

I think more people need to do such tests. I guess it could be some bug in the driver as well. Could be anything at this point.

I'll try the ICD driver next I think as it's simple to do..

[stephen_usher]

Maybe write/read tests with CRC checks to see if the files are being written correctly would be useful. Files of different sizes too.

That's the only way I found the buffer bug in my Apricot hard drive simulator.

[exxos]

Maybe write/read tests with CRC checks to see if the files are being written correctly would be useful. Files of different sizes too.

I guess it's possible writes failed but crashing tos as well..

I could try creating a self extracting zip file of my test files as I think that would verify CRC on extraction. Not sure if CRC still happens on empty folders though.

Saying that , yesterday's test I copied my test files from a windows zip file onto the SD card.. so the files at that point are fine anyway.

[exxos]

I tried the ICD drivers. though it comes up " illegal operation" if I try and delete the whole card at once. it does work if I delete around 500 files at once though oddly. AHDI I cannot figure out and gave up with it.

I tried PP driver and that one successfully deleted all the files without crashing! I swear it is faster as well anyway I noticed this while it was deleting..

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It only ever comes up that string sequence on the folder names. I suspect this is what is crashing HD11. So for starters there must be a bug in HD11.

However The question now is why those folder names are corrupted in the first place. I have a zip file on my PC and I do not notice any invalid filenames. I even did a DOS TREE so I could search for the '*B' and did not find anything.

This now opens a whole new can of worms because I think technically this would now be a READ error on the DMA port. the folder names are not being correctly read, if they are corrupted, why does PP driver delete them.

The simplest thing is to investigate the SD card itself. So will see if I can do a sector scan on it etc and see if I can notice the corrupted file names on the card itself.

[rubber_jonnie]

@exxos

I take it you're using a paid for version of HD 11? The demo version has 'reduced functionality'.

Have you tried PPera's driver?

BTW I replied to your PM

[exxos]

I take it you're using a paid for version of HD 11? The demo version has 'reduced functionality'.

Yep, been buying it since the HD7 days.

Have you tried PPera's driver?

Yep, mentioned in the top of my post